Bad Data

The best defense against being taken in by the pseudoscientist is an awareness of
logical fallacies and a strict determination not to fall for emotional appeals. In
addition to the logical fallacies, however, pseudoscientists also sooner or later always
end up using bad data, and a non-specialist may be hard put to tell good data from bad.
Some of the data found in pseudoscience, and some examples, include:

Obsolete Data

Random Events Collected Into Spurious Patterns

Parapsychology

Real Phenomena Misinterpreted As Anomaly

Venus As UFO

Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot Sightings

Revisionist Interpretations of Well-understood Phenomena

Von Daniken

Creationism

Psychological Phenomena

Biased Observations

Hypnogogic and Hypnopompic Dreams

Confabulation

Second-hand Data (Urban Legends)

Anecdotal Evidence

"Gee Whiz" Facts

Deliberate Fraud

Parapsychology

Genuine New Discoveries

Semmelweiss and Antisepsis?

Robert Gentry and Radiation Halos?

Obsolete Data

The "Ghost Literature" of Pseudoscience

Many of the wonders science supposedly "cannot explain" actually contain
nothing to explain. The "facts" are based on obsolete data, hoaxes, coincidence,
and the like. In fact, it is useful to have a broad overview of pseudoscience because
pseudoscientists commonly cite one another's theories. Erich von Daniken, for example,
cited a theory about the capture of the earth's moon that was a popular cult before World
War II, and cited numerical coincidences involving the Pyramids that originated in a 19th
century Pyramid cult. Creationists cite criticisms of radiometric dating that were
originally put forth by Velikovsky supporters. These "facts" look very
impressive to the perplexed non-scientist.

Some items of bad data have become dogma in pseudoscience. The "mysterious
disappearance of Flight 19", a group of Navy planes which disappeared off Florida in
1945, is a case in point. Complete recordings of the radio traffic between the base and
the planes were transcribed in the official investigation into the disaster, and show
clearly that the planes headed out into the Atlantic in the mistaken belief that they were
west of Florida. Recall that radar was in its infancy in those days. John Wallace Spencer,
in Limbo of the Lost, actually quotes a flier as saying "Can't tell whether over
Atlantic or Gulf". Yet this incident has become a stock item in the Bermuda Triangle
literature. Another stock item are the frozen mammoths of Siberia, supposedly flash-frozen
instantly with plants in their stomach that now grow far to the south. One gets the
general impression of bananas and papayas, but actually the vegetation in the mammoths'
stomachs consisted of pine and spruce twigs and tundra flowers -- normal Siberian
vegetation. The best-known specimen was buried when a riverbank caved in on him, breaking
his shoulder and hip bones. Somehow these inconvenient details never make it into the
popular literature, despite the fact that the frozen mammoths, like Flight 19, are de
rigeur in any pseudoscience best-seller. In effect, the literature of pseudoscience
is a sort of parallel literature to that of science.

Outdated Science

Another very common approach to data might be called the "lobster trap"
approach. Lobster traps are built so that once the lobster gets in, he cannot get out.
Pseudoscientists assume that once an idea is published in the scientific literature it is
forevermore legitimate evidence, regardless of its original validity or any subsequent
findings -- after all, it's "science", isn't it? If the information is refuted
or modified later, that just proves once again how fickle science is, so that the final
judgment comes down to a subjective one. The experts disagree, so the individual has to
decide for himself which alternative to accept. Relativism strikes again.

For example, as the theory of continental drift won widespread acceptance in the late
1960's, a small number of conservative geologists wrote papers arguing against the theory.
That was their right and duty as scientists, but most of the arguments they employed were
outright balderdash at the time and unlike wine they have not improved with age. To anyone
even remotely familiar with the data, these arguments were transparently specious and
filled with glaring fallacies. Nevertheless, scientific creationists continue to cite
these papers in an attempt to support their own version of earth history with
"scientific" evidence. This is a game science cannot win. If scientists revise
their ideas, the very fact that they do is taken not as evidence of improvements in
knowledge, but as evidence of how changeable and uncertain the results of science are. If
science remains firm in a belief, that's evidence not that the idea is correct but that
scientists are too pig-headed and dogmatic to change.

Random Events Collected Into Spurious Patterns

In
1932, one of parapsychology's
star performers, Hubert Pearce, guessed 25 consecutive ESP cards correctly. The
chances of getting a run of 25 psychic research cards (the standard deck has
five each of five different symbols) is one in five to the twenty-fifth power,
or one in 295,023,223,876,953,125. Believers in parapsychology insist the
probability is so extreme that this incident is proof of a real phenomenon.
Skeptics are struck by the inability to repeat these results under controlled
conditions and suspect either that the cards were not entirely random (poorly
shuffled) or that the subject somehow figured out what the cards were by seeing
them reflected in the table top or the experimenter's glasses, or by cuing in on
faint nicks, marks, and smudges on the cards. This process need not involve
conscious dishonesty. Let's say, however, that the experiment took place exactly
as described, without any information reaching the subject by ordinary means,
and that the subject actually did overcome enormous odds. What have we proven?
Only that an extremely rare event took place. We haven't proven that ESP exists
because we are no closer to knowing the mechanism by which the event took place
than we ever were. The event could have been chance, or perhaps some other
effect completely unrelated to ESP was involved. If we had some theoretical
basis to go on we might accept an extremely rare event as evidence because we
would have some solid basis for believing the event had a real cause, but in the
absence of a workable theory and without
the ability to reproduce the event so that we can test different hypotheses, the
event just sits in splendid isolation
and tells us nothing.

Even
the most avowed
believers in paranormal phenomena agree that apparent runs
of successful guesses come and go erratically. When a possibly
real phenomenon is buried amid a great deal of noise, there
is a real possibility that the patterns we perceive may be nothing more than the
products of our own imaginations. The
very existence of the word "coincidence" is a powerful clue to how
prone we can be to see spurious patterns in random data.

Real Phenomena Misinterpreted As Anomaly

Venus As UFO

Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot Sightings

Revisionist Interpretations of Well-understood Phenomena

Very often, things science "can't explain" turn out to have perfectly
straightforward explanations. Despite the claims of Erich von Daniken and many others,
there is no mystery at all how the Pyramids were constructed. Museums have the
stonecutting tools and rollers that Von Daniken and other Pyramid cultists claim
have never been found. Contrary to the claims of
creationists, intermediate forms between most major groups of related organisms do exist.
We do know what happened to Flight 19, how frozen mammoths got frozen, and so on.

Psychological Phenomena

Pseudoscientists tend to take some kinds of evidence with near-absolute literalness:
legends of various kinds, eyewitness accounts of UFO's or mysterious creatures, personal
accounts of "after death" experiences, astral travel, clairvoyance or telepathy,
or hypnotic accounts of reincarnation. The general rule governing all this sort of
evidence is that it is highly personal and subjective, impossible to evaluate or verify
rigorously, not subject to controlled experiment, and based on personal experience rather
than objective physical evidence. There is probably a close relationship between the
preference for this sort of evidence and the widespread feeling that science and
technology have mechanized and dehumanized humanity. Like the humanities' support for
Velikovsky, there seems to be a desire to see subjective human experiences make a
contribution to the physical sciences and thereby "prove" their usefulness and
scientific validity.

When I first began researching pseudoscience, I was struck by how often apparently sane
people swore they had seen something really outlandish. I wondered how often do
otherwise normal people hallucinate? The answer, it turns out, is a lot more often
than one might think. In fact there's a whole range of waking and semi-waking
hallucinatory phenomena. Hypnogogic and hypnopompic dreams are dreams
that occur while a person is dozing off or waking up, and therefore mix waking sensations
with dreams. A lot of the alleged instances in which people see angels standing at the
bedside are probably of this sort. I once talked with an otherwise very rational person
who told of waking up one night and seeing a UFO land near his house; it's very likely
this was also an example of a waking dream. I've had a couple of these myself.
Generally I'll be in bed (that's where you usually are when going to sleep or
waking up) and will "remember" odd things. The "memories" have a harsh,
discordant feel to them, and sometimes I'll even wonder "did I dream that or did
it really happen?" Or sometimes I'll think the memory is so odd it must have
been a dream.

Some people have such vivid fantasy lives that they actually experience some of the
sensations of the fantasy. This phenomenon is called confabulation. (If I knew
how to induce this state deliberately, I could become obscenely wealthy, but I don't.) After
reading an account of the phenomenon in the journal Skeptical Enquirer, one
person who frequently experienced confabulation wrote in to describe his enormous relief
at not being alone in having these episodes. He described that he had evolved a variety of
techniques for telling which stimuli were real and which merely imaginary. It's easy to
imagine someone unaware of having the condition, or who experienced it very rarely,
believing that a fantasy was the real thing.

Second-hand Data: Urban Legends and Anecdotal Data

The guru of urban legends is Jan Harold Brunvand, a folklorist at the
University of Utah, who has published numerous books on the subject. I can do no
better than recommend that you read them all. Alligators in the sewer? The kid
who dries off the family cat in the microwave? The girl in the 1960's with the
beehive hairdo who found critters living in it? The petting couple who are
terrified by a radio report of a hook-handed serial killer and drive off, only
to find a hook hanging in the door when they get home? They're all there. And
not a one is true. Read Brunvand's books! You'll cringe with embarrassment at
how many of these hoary myths you've passed along yourself.

The Internet has made it possible to proliferate these myths even faster. A
few prominent recent examples include:

The warning that some gangs have an initiation rite that involves driving
around with their lights off, then, when a helpful driver flashes his
lights, following and killing the driver.

The father who arranges a hot cybersex meeting only to discover that the
person at the other end of the conversation is his daughter.

The girl who comes back from vacation, where she had a brief love affair,
and getting a package from her lover. Inside is a series of progressively
smaller boxes, and inside the last is a note saying "Welcome to the
world of AIDS."

All of these might have happened at some time or other. One of the
hallmarks of urban legends is that they could be true. But in almost
every case, the people who pass these legends along have no direct knowledge of
them. They always come from a friend of a friend, and efforts to track the story
to its original source never seem to succeed.

Anecdotal Evidence is a single, possibly true instance used to justify
a generalization. Everybody who refuses to wear a seat belt has a story of how
their Aunt Gertrude was miraculously hurled out of her car into a pile of rose
petals just before the car went off a bridge, burst into flames, and sank in
quicksand. They simply choose to ignore the far larger number of cases where
Aunt Gertrude has to be picked up with a squeegee. To be legitimate evidence,
anecdotal evidence has to be true (often it's not) and representative.
The anecdote has to illustrate something that happens as a rule, not as an
exception.

"The millionaire who pays no taxes" is another popular piece of
anecdotal data, especially with political liberals. According to the 1999 Statistical
Abstract of the United States (Table 559), the 111,000 taxpayers who
reported income of over $1,000,000 dollars in 1996 (the average was about $2.8
million) paid an average of $875,000, or 31 per cent. Taxpayers with $50-75,000
income paid an average of $7300 or 12 per cent. Taxpayers reporting the average
income of $35,000 paid $3400 or 9.7 per cent. So millionaires earn on the
average about 81 times as much as the average taxpayer but pay 257times
as much tax. Some millionaires do indeed pay no tax because they can offset
income against business losses or are paid from tax-exempt bonds, but the
anecdote, though true, is not representative.

"Gee-Whiz" Facts are facts that look impressive but have no
substance. A prime example is the claim "suicide is the second leading
cause of death among teen-agers." Without in any way making light of this
problem, think for a second. What can kill a teen-ager? They've already survived
childhood diseases and are not prone to diseases of aging yet, so only three
things can be significant causes of death among teen-agers: accident, suicide,
and homicide. Anything other than that order indicates a real problem, but
suicide will always be a leading cause of death among teen-agers.

Another "gee-whiz" fact that pops up during our periodic binges of
panic over missing children is "over a million children are reported
missing every year." Again referring to the 1999 Statistical Abstract of
the United States, about a third of the population, or 77 million people,
are 19 or younger. If a million kids vanish every year, in 19 years, 19 million
would vanish. One child in four would disappear before reaching adulthood. I
think we'd notice that. Yes indeed, a million children are reported
missing every year but the vast majority are found within a few hours.

Deliberate Fraud

Parapsychology has seen rampant fraud, with leading researchers repeatedly caught
fudging experiments and fabricating data. Even
reputable paranormal researchers can and have resorted to
fakery. An embarrassing incident took place in 1974, when Walter Levy, Jr., then
director of the Institute for Parapsychology in Durham, N.C., was found to have
faked experimental results. The experimental design Levy was working on was
superb. A rat in a cage had an electrode planted in the pleasure center of its
brain, so that the animal would get a pleasurable stimulus when a current was
applied to the wire. Animals so wired will do almost anything to keep getting
such stimuli, even ignoring food and sex. Levy's rat got a stimulus every time a
detector detected the decay of a radioactive atom. If the animal had the ability
through paranormal means to increase the number of stimuli the evidence for
paranormal powers would be very strong. This is exactly the sort of evidence it
would take to demonstrate paranormal effects: the rat is not biased and cannot
cheat, and there is no known process that can influence the decay of radioactive
materials. The results of such a discovery, to put it mildly, would be
far-reaching.

Workers noted
that Levy, a well-known researcher in parapsychology, was unusually attentive to
the apparatus, and finally saw
him disconnecting a wire to the recorder that registered the results of the
experiment. Each disconnection registered a false positive result and therefore
made the experimental results look more favorable to Levy's theory. Levy, who
had a promising career in parapsychology, resigned.

Levy was sincerely convinced
of the reality of his phenomenon (as most scientific frauds are) but desperate
to get results. Uri Geller, who rose to worldwide fame in the 1970's for his
alleged psychic abilities, was an outright cynical fraud. Physicists
Harold
Puthoff and Russell Targ of the Stanford Research Institute (not connected with
Stanford University) were very much impressed by the feats of Geller, who could
supposedly bend metal through psychic power. Several other prominent physicists
involved in paranormal research were highly impressed by Geller. Unfortunately,
Geller was seen cheating by professional magicians who were better equipped to
spot his sleight-of-hand methods than the physicists, and his stunts were
successfully copied, so Geller has since fallen from favor. But not before he did a huge amount of damage. He sued his
exposers and lost. They countersued,
charging that Geller's lawsuit was frivolous and malicious. They won, but Geller
took refuge in his native Israel and never paid up. Still doubt we need radical
tort reform?

Just
how easy it can be to con believers in parapsychology is shown by a hilarious
incident during the heyday of Uri Geller. Magician John Randi, who was then
little known in paranormal circles, showed up at the offices of Psychic News in
London. He introduced himself as James Zwinge (his real name) and for two hours
kept the office in an uproar by bending metal, changing the times on clocks, and
duplicating almost all the celebrated feats of psychics using perfectly standard
stage techniques. Psychic News ran the story on the front page, complete with
claims of "constant surveillance" and assertions that metal had bent
when "all could vouch Zwinge had not been near it."

Parapsychologists
are insulted by the emphasis on fraud in their field, but the plain fact is the
field has been so compromised that the only way to redeem it is to start over
from scratch, junking everything done up till now, including the assumption
that paranormal phenomena exist at all, and start over with a totally
clean slate.

Genuine New Discoveries

One of the heroes of pseudoscience is Ignatz Semmelweiss, who began using
antisepsis in the 1850's, a decade before it was generally accepted in medicine.
Semmelweiss was driven out of medicine by his fellow doctors. What
pseudoscientists don't tell you is that Semmelweiss was in some ways a crank. He
had noticed that doctors who went directly from performing autopsies to
delivering babies had an appalling record of post-partum deaths. When he
insisted that doctors scrub with a caustic solution, his ward soon had the best
survival rates. But Semmelweiss theorized that it was the smell of death
clinging to the doctor that caused infection, something that must have seemed a
throwback to the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, here we have a real case of an
apparently crackpot idea turning out to have a real basis in fact.